Painted Door...Check!

And more of a distance...so you can see the black tying in with the ole' dining room chairs.

Honestly, this was such a simple painting project, especially compared to the striping project from way back when. It is a bit tedious to tape off the window panes and trim out around the door knob and such, but totally do-able.

A few things I learned along the way...

1. The door needs to be slightly open for A WHILE before it loses its "tacky" enough to be closed. Make sure to paint on a cooler day (I painted this past Saturday and it wasn't too awful hot), so that you can leave the door open as long as you need to for drying purposes.

2. Don't paint a door (even the interior side) on a damp day. The nice little neighborhood Porter Paint store man told me to even give it a few days after a rainy day to ensure that the dampness in the air is gone. Otherwise, your paint will stay tacky for a long while.

3. Ask your local paint store people which paint would be best when you are completing a project like this. They are so darn helpful! My paint guy suggested an interior/exterior paint that is very durable for our door:

As you can see, I went with a semi-gloss (which typically shows every brush stroke--not good), but I felt like it might work because our door has some faux wood-graining texture to it. I also agreed with Porter Paint man that I wanted the paint to be as durable as possible (relatively low up-keep is how we like it around here). As it turns out, the semi-gloss worked out perfectly--no crazy brush strokes, thank goodness.

4. Go with a small foam roller. Though annoying because it holds very little paint, your paint typically goes on smoother with this type:

I actually decided to trim out with a foam brush as well because it's all I had clean. I figured it couldn't hurt anything. Also, very annoying to use, but it did seem that my strokes were slightly less noticeable around the door knobs and such using this.

Well, this is what I know. I hope I've convinced others out there that are scaredy-painters (like I was) that it is totally worth it to paint the interior panel of your exterior doors.